Wisconsin Energy Corp. CEO Gale Klappa used what may be his strongest wording yet to revive the possibility of adding nuclear-power capacity in the state.

Klappa, speaking to a luncheon audience of the Greater Milwaukee Committee at the University Club downtown, said the state’s nuclear plants are aging fast and will need to be replaced by the decade starting in 2020. A Wisconsin law from the 1970s bars building nuclear-power capacity unless the federal government develops a plan to control and store spent nuclear fuel, he said.

“Frankly I think we need to have in the state of Wisconsin nuclear as an option put back on the table,” Klappa said in response to a question on power sources of the future. “We don’t need a major increment of new power capacity probably till past 2020 in our region, but before then we have to make that decision.”

Klappa called for a debate in the state Legislature about replacing the nuclear power plants at Point Beach and Kewaunee. The plants are about 40 years old and supply about 20 percent of Wisconsin’s energy supply, he said.

For now, Wisconsin Energy customers have ample supplies due to the company’s $7.8 billion “Power the Future” projects that were completed in 2011, Klappa said. He credited the new natural-gas plant in Port Washington and new coal-power plant in Oak Creek with helping avert brownouts and blackouts during the hottest days of this summer.

Wisconsin Energy will attain by late 2013 the state-mandated requirement to supply 10 percent of electricity to residential customers via renewable energy sources, Klappa said. That is when the company will complete a $255 million biomass plant in Rothschild to go with wind farms and other initiatives.